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Review: PowerMockup - Wireframing with PowerPoint

Review: PowerMockup - Make wireframes with PowerPoint

In the absence of design / UX folk, Product Managers are sometimes called upon to create mockups. The tools I’ve seen fall in a spectrum from quick ‘n’ dirty to glorious but laborious: POP + pen and paper: the flexibility, speed and feel of pen and paper moqups, Balsamiq: speed and decent looks, but you’re basically stuck with their library of components Photoshop, Sketch: Maximum fidelity, but…

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Day 654

Reflections for the day: I think too much. Analysis paralysis. Sure thinking I’d great, but if you stop yourself before you even start, or if you fry your brain before you manage to ask the important questions, that can’t be good. Maybe I’m not as comfortable with uncertainty as I thought I was. Golly, some features look very simple on the outside, but have a lot more going on behind the scenes.…

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Day 576 - Minimum complexity?

Day 576 – Minimum complexity?

Been struggling through requirements for a new feature for a bit now. Thought – it seems like a thin line between fighting for simplicity and “lazy avoidance”. Is the simple solution really the result of deep understanding the real issues?

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College VS Corporate: Marketing

My exposure to marketing in college was very broad – one could say it was comprehensive, covering functional aspects from advertising and packaging, to pricing and distribution. Yet it lacked coverage of the day-to-day skills required – from industry knowledge to project management. Consequently, I had glitzy, glamourous associations with a marketing job. In my mind, it was all about creative…

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Road Trippin' in Western Australia: South of Perth

Road Trippin’ in Western Australia: South of Perth

The last time I was in Perth, we took a road trip up North to Kalbarri. This time, South was the obvious way to go. It happened to be whale season, so seeing one of the huge mammals became a “must-do” on our checklist. The season lasts a whooping 7 months from May to November, though where exactly you can catch the mammals does vary over the months. This was our itinerary, along with some of our…

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Two birds with one stone features...

Two birds with one stone features…

… Would probably work if the birds were already dead (the problem isn’t worth solving). Or if the birds were trapped in a really small space (they’re actually the same problem). Or maybe, you’d have to kill one bird with a stone first, then you pick up the same stone, give it a little polish, and kill the other (tackle one problem at a time).

Observation:it’s easy to think that one feature is the…

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so that's delightful...

There is this general notion of different “hierarchies” in the user experience – below expectations, meets expectations, exceeds expectations etc… the holy grail being “delight” .

It’s easy to find textbook definitions of delight. In practice though, I don’t feel like there are many apps or services that bring this sense of exhilaration or surprise. Maybe I’m just cynical – not much is new…

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my web programming journey (so far)

Thank you @roguelynn for letting us newbies know there is hope!

Highlights of my journey + some key resources so far:

HTML 4.0 way back in 2000

Heard about Python from a colleague at work in 2013

Learn Python the Hard Way(v2.7) – great introduction to the basics of Python, and also tries to set up your mindset for programming in general (memorisation, getting you to search for answers,…

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Here’s the Schedule Very Successful People Follow Every Day

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Day 241: Measuring myself

Today is unofficial KPIs day!

I’ve started re-thinking my personal metrics (and by extension, the products I’m working on). Why the sudden thought? A question in jest, an article or two.

You might have heard me lament recently about my lack of experience, or (I cringe) seen my feeble attempts (one and two) to set goals for myself. This still isn’t very natural or comfortable for me – if shining a…

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Day 236: Reflect

So, close to eight months now!

In the last week:

I felt like I’m finally starting to spread my wings (insert Frozen theme song) – like there’s some direction for the roadmap, got some buy in…

I also realised I still know pitifully little about the business and my users. It’s easy to hide behind the quantity of users, flux of processes and learning curve, but I sure think I could have done more…

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Day 168: The Sailboat

Reactive is how I would describe today.

I wonder if other Product Managers have these sort of days too. You know, the ones where you’re like a sailboat, tossed by the waves, going where the wind blows.

Today: - met with my boss and a UX-pert here on internship, and realized I had to quickly arrange some more meetings to make most of her time and expertise - got a few pings from stakeholders on…

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Day 160: Now or never

Would you do work with business impact now, knowing that it could require a complete reworking (or worse, become obsolete) further down the road?

So we could improve an import feature to save the users time now (let’s call this “problem A”). But at the same time, we’re re-evaluating the product construct and are considering a reasonably big change to solve another “problem B”. This change would…

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Day 155: Don't we all

Day 155: Don’t we all

It’s liberating to know the team accepts you’ll make mistakes. A misjudgement of what users really need, a misstep in development, a missed perspective that radically impacts the spec.

A little nod, a smile and a “Well, that’s taking risk, right?” go a long way.

Thanks guys.

I jumped from Product Marketing to Product Management at Zalora recently. These posts represent a journal of my learnings…

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Day 146: You can't sit everyone in a room

Day 146: You can’t sit everyone in a room

… Or you could, potentially leading product development into the quagmire of approval processes, indecision and standoffs. In other words, down the spiral of PRODUCT DEATH!

I exaggerate (or on second thoughts, maybe not I’m too far off), but how willing are you and your team to adopt the “do first and ask for forgiveness later” mantra? Especially if possible implications are being wrong (without…

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Day 142: Agree to Disagree...

Day 142: Agree to Disagree…

Too much is unproductive, too little limits your product.

A few days back I had a (slightly) heated discussion with a stakeholder on changing the name of a field in the system. I was a little defensive at first because there were some concerns: possibly needing to migrate existing data, transiting users etc. And it was a little trivial, something that we could educate users (especially since it’s…

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Commit #001

The last commit (#000) can be found here. In this week’s commit:

The Role of a Product Manager

Be a Great Product Leader (for Dropbox/AirBnb 2013), by Adam Nash, 15 Slides, 4 mins. Nicely sums up the main role of a PM over three areas – strategy, prioritisation and execution. Light and heavy at the same time!

Ode to a non-technical Product Manager, by Hunter Walk,3 mins. Also sums up the role of…

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